But even its leaders think their country so dangerous that its 275 MPs and 31 cabinet ministers are more often to be found in Nairobi than in Mogadishu.

Their transitional federal administration controls little more than a few blocks of the capital, and then only thanks to the muscle provided by several thousand African Union peacekeepers.

Beyond those few streets, there is chaos. There has been no central authority to build roads, hire teachers, stock hospitals or impose order for almost two decades.

Into that vacuum rushed powerful clans, whose head-men cut up the country into fiefdoms they taxed like mediaeval lords, to pay for guns. When there was no policeman to arrest them, or courts to try them, their rule was absolute.

That situation persists today.

Except there has been an attempt to bring the country under the rule of one master – but that master was radical Islam.

Added into the anarchic mix, there are now several strands of an Islamist insurgency, linked to al-Qa’eda, which have tried to impose strict interpretations of Koranic law on the perpetually cowed population.

Because of that, very little of the country is accessible to outsiders, especially Westerners.

International aid agencies in southern Somalia rely on local staff. Foreigners who do travel there must do so with extreme security.

Al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgents, had focused until recently on causing havoc inside the nation they were determined to rule.

But then they sent suicide bombers to target football fans watching the World Cup Final in Uganda, two countries away across East Africa. Almost 80 people died in the two separate blasts.

It has long been dangerous to be a Somali inside Somalia – allied to the wrong clan, not pious enough for Al-Shabaab's roving religious police.

Now the concern is that this most uncontrollable of nations plans a new export of evil from its ungoverned emptiness.

And that is without counting the pirates, with whom al-Shabaab maintains an uneasy arms-length relationship.

Although piracy’s root motivation is mercenary not political, they, too, are exporting chaos, halfway across the Indian Ocean, as Paul and Rachel Chandler discovered.